In some countries, the study and pursuit of Artificial Intelligence (AI) proceeds apace, while in this country the practice of Artificial Unintelligence (AU) becomes ever more widespread.
AU is the means by which people of perfectly adequate natural intelligence are transformed by policies, procedures and protocols into animate but inflexible cogs. They speak and behave, but do not think or decide. They are always only carrying out orders and stick to them through thick and thin.
AU is much in evidence in the organisation of the NHS. Its great advantage, from a certain point of view, is the multiplication of job opportunities for bureaucrats that it necessitates. But for patients, it often turns the simplest of tasks, such as the obtaining of a prescription, into a nightmarish labour of Hercules.
My wife’s situation was simple. She had seen a cardiologist who prescribed a medication for her which was effective. He gave her a prescription for two weeks, to be repeated by her general practitioner. Towards the end of the two weeks, the consultant’s letter had not arrived at the surgery and we were soon going abroad. My wife needed to talk to a doctor at the surgery to obtain a prescription, which no doctor would have refused, since the medication was a perfectly ordinary one in wide current use, and cheap as well.
The problem was the procedure, the policies, and the protocols. Over a period of several days, she was told by the staff of the surgery, inter alia:
- That the doctor could not prescribe her medicine without the consultant’s letter, an evident absurdity;
- That she could not consult a doctor in less than two weeks because the renewal of a prescription was not an urgent matter and therefore not eligible for an urgent appointment;
- That it was her responsibility to ensure that the consultant’s letter arrived, and also to phone every day at 8.30 a.m. sharp on the off-chance that there had been a cancelled appointment that she might take;
- That there was nothing that could be done because of the policies, procedures and protocols laid down, and that all patients had to be treated the same, irrespective of their situation.
When I went to the surgery, I asked the receptionist – making clear that I did not blame her personally – whether she did not think it shameful that it would have been easier and quicker for my wife to obtain her medication by going abroad than by walking 300 yards to the surgery from her house: to which the receptionist replied that she understood our frustration, but that the protocol was the protocol. My suggestion that she actually thought rather than followed a protocol seemed almost shocking to her, like a criticism of Mohammed’s character in a mosque.
We had already discovered quite by chance, my wife and I, that e-mails apparently sent to the doctors in the surgery were diverted to some kind of computer, and were not read, as we had naively supposed. So I took a letter, couched in no uncertain terms, to the surgery to be handed in person to the senior partner, with a mild threat of further action if the request were not complied with.
At seven in the evening a telephone call from the surgery informed us that the doctor had written a prescription and sent it to the pharmacy. The Artificial Unintelligence of the staff, trained and enjoined never to think, had wasted hours of our and their time over a period of days, to say nothing of the misery it inflicted on us.
But it should not be thought that we were just unlucky. A friend of ours had a very similar experience and had to resort to a virtual sit-down to obtain what should have taken a fraction of a moment to obtain.
The whole country is rotted by AU, not least the police, but also schools, social services, town councils, universities and even private companies, especially large ones.
It is of no recent date. Some years ago, I was asked to investigate six untoward events – five murders and a suicide – that had happened in a hospital in a comparatively short time. Was there any single factor that accounted for this unexpected cluster?
In the event, I found that in only two of them were actually attributable to professional error, but what united them all was the evident stupidity of the staff. They were not so much stupid by nature, as stupefied by policy, procedure and protocol. For them, obeying procedure was their work, an end rather than a means.
I will always remember my interview with the medical director after I completed my inquiry.
‘I didn’t find anything in common in these cases,’ I said, ‘except the stupidity of your staff.
I expected him to get angry, but he maintained a Buddha-like calm.
‘Oh, I know,’ he replied, ‘but that is the standard expected now.’
I am rarely lost for words, but on this occasion I was. And he was right, of course – Artificial Unintelligence, or Bureaucracy-Induced Stupidity, is what we expect in Britain.
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